Christmas Special Article no. 7: JESUS EXISTED

In much of today’s world, Jesus is arguably the most famous being in history. Even the Quran makes prominent mention of him (25 times, plus an entire chapter dedicated to his mother Mary). Muslims too take cognizance of him the only difference being Muslims do not recognise him as God. More books have been written about him than any other figure of history. In Christendom, he is actually God himself, who took the form of mortal man, a phenomenon known as the incarnation.

When he walked the Earth in the first century, Jesus is said to have performed miracles – healing paralytics, restoring sight to the blind, bringing the dead back to life, and even commanding the elements to quietude, such as the tempests at sea. He himself was killed but he physically reanimated, full of health and vitality. He held healing and evangelising crusades that attracted throngs in their thousands. For a man who wrought such great deeds, he should have blazed in the firmament of his day. He should have featured in the writings of practically every historian who lived around or happened to visit Palestine around that time. Yet the irony of ironies is that the only substantive mentions of Jesus in familiar literature are found in the Bible. Outside it, he is almost unheard of.

In his 1909 book, The Christ A Myth, John Remsburg lists 42 historians, Roman and Jewish alike, who were contemporaneous with Jesus. None of them makes any worthwhile reference to Jesus or his disciples. Michael Paulkovitch (No Meek Messiah, 2012), actually points to 146 of such “silent witnesses” who never heard of Jesus at all. Let us just take one of them, Philo of Alexandria (25 BC to 50 AD), a famous Jewish historian and philosopher who both predated and outlived the Jesus of the gospels. Philo had connections to the Jewish priesthood and the Herodian dynasty in Jerusalem and wrote a great deal about the goings-on in Palestine at the time. He does not say a single word about Jesus!

THE TESTIMONIUM FLAVIANUM
There was a near-contemporary of Jesus who most Christian apologists (fanatical defenders of the contents of the gospels even where they do not make sense) cite as perhaps the most authoritative extra-biblical source on the existence of Jesus. This is Flavius Josephus (37-100 AD), the best-known and the most prolific of Jewish historians. In his most famous work, The Jewish Antiquities, is found what has become known in theological circles as the Testimonium Flavianum, a passage which reads as follows: “About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was one who performed surprising deeds and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Messiah. And when, upon the accusation of the principal men among us, Pilate had condemned him to a cross, those who had first come to love him did not cease. He appeared to them spending a third day restored to life, for the prophets of God had foretold these things and a thousand other marvels about him. And the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared.”

The problem with the Josephus passage is that scholars are almost unanimous that it is a fraud. The Jewish Antiquities was published in AD 93. The first person to quote the Testamonium Flavianum was Eusebius of Caesarea (263-339 AD) 200 years later. All the Church Fathers who lived before Eusebius such as Origen, Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, and Clement of Alexandria and who substantially referenced Josephus never ever alluded to the Testimonium Flavianum. Clearly, it was Eusebius, desperate to showcase a historical Jesus, who inserted the passage into the Josephus volume. We know Eusebius was capable of such chicanery as in his own books he boasted about lying with a view to advancing a certain, sacrosanct agenda.

If secular history cannot trace the Jesus of faith, then it follows that he is pure fiction, the subject of “cleverly devised myths” as Simon Peter put it in one of his epistles. Is Jesus nothing but a astrological or astrotheological character as we indeed have argued thus far in this mini-series?

A PROTECTED MASCOT
The Jesus of the gospel may sound like the stuff of myth but the fact of the matter is that he did exist. Jesus was very much a historical figure. But there is a whole host of differences between the Jesus of history and the Jesus of faith.

The Jesus of history was born in the normal way (the Bible actually intimates so: the virgin birth is astrological on the one hand and the result of a rather shallow understanding of the gospel stories on the other, as we shall soon demonstrate). The Jesus of history was hardly a miracle worker nor a religious firebrand. He was a freedom fighter, albeit a peaceful one. He was a spiritual luminary of course but not so much in the sense of founding a religion as in the sense of instruction. In other words, he was primarily a teacher. His underlying mission, however, was essentially political as opposed to being theological. He was a Davidic messiah, somebody who was expected by mainstream Jews to oust the Romans and restore the Kingdom of Judah, not the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. The Jesus of history was not as famous as the gospels project him. Like most freedom fighters, he was more of a shadowy figure than a public square demagogue. He became famous posthumously, if I may be permitted to use such a word as he lived beyond Calvary. He in fact lived to about age 80. The Jesus of history was not celibate. He was married and even had kids. The celibacy of Jesus as preached by the clergy is contrived: the Bible itself makes it very clear Jesus was a married man.

The Jewish establishment, who included the Herod dynasty, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Essenes, and the Temple priests all did recognise Jesus as of dynastic stock but the political polemics were such that not everybody rallied around him as the undisputed Davidic messiah. The establishment was in two factions generally – those who recognised Jesus as the Davidic messiah and those who campaigned for his immediate younger brother James – for reasons we shall go into in future articles. Even then, there was no real animosity between the two factions as the only adversary who really mattered was the occupying power – the Romans. Since Jesus was more or less the rallying Jewish political figure, his profile was kept very low by deliberate design, with the result that the Roman authorities were scarcely aware of his existence and his whereabouts. Even the few members of the Jewish public who were aware of his social status were not in the slightest inclined to spotlight him. They did not wish to jeopardise him with the Romans at all. All Jewish historians, including Josephus, avoided a direct and elaborate chronicling of his activities for his own safety and that of his heirs. He was expected by mainstream Jewry to rule a liberated Palestine and so he had to be shielded from the merest publicity. In the gospels themselves, there are hints, actually, that Jesus didn’t want his messianic status to be proclaimed to the world at large (the triumphant entry into Jerusalem is wholly out of context).

Since it was in the interests of the Jewish establishment, the Jewish historians, and the Jewish public – call it Jewish solidarity – to keep the agenda and stratagems of Jesus a closely guarded secret, it is easy to understand why he is almost totally absent from secular history, with only passing mentions of his saga here and there. It is unfortunate that this stark fact has escaped the so-called scholars of our day. If they deserve sympathy, it is only because gospel narratives, or their misunderstanding, have led people to believe that Jesus was a kind of phenomenon in his day who was a household name when he actually was far from that. He was a very obscure, self-effacing figure folks and was overshadowed by the likes of John the Baptist and the Herods. The Herods only turned against him when he began to vociferously assert his messiahship at their expense. All such dynamics of the day will become clear as the series unfold.

JESUS FAR FROM LILY-WHITE
Let us first put the Jesus of history in context before we zero in on his nativity. Jesus was a Jew. He was of the tribe of Judah and a descendant of King David, Israel’s most famous and most beloved King. He grew up in a part of the world which at the time was known as Palestine, which is today’s Israel plus the occupied territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The Palestine of Jesus’ day comprised of three provinces. They were Judea in the south, Samaria in the midlands, and Galilee in the north. Jesus was legally from Galilee though he was born in Judea.

In our day, we have become accustomed to depictions of a white-skinned, blue-eyed, and blonde-haired Jesus. That is all a forgery. It is a contrived image meant to entrench the propaganda of white supremacy, of the racist paradigm that since white stands for “purity” and “positivity”, Jesus too, the very model of a good man according to the gospels, must have been white. If you are of a similar belief because you too pander to this narrative, then I have news for you. Jesus was not white. He was black like me. Maybe not as exactly dark-skinned as I am but he was of the Negroid race, with coffee-coloured skin, like that of your typical Ethiopian.

Yes, today Jews come in all shades. There are black Jews, such as the Falashas of Ethiopia, white Jews, such as Henry Kissinger, and what are called Sephardic Jews, the Jews who look like Arabs. Jews have typically been a mixed race because Jewry is more about religious faith – Judaism – than skin colour. In antiquity, however, Jews were predominantly black. The line of Jesus for one was black as we shall soon attest.

Edward Mitole